


Postcard of a Painting

by CloudAtlas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: be_compromised, F/M, Joining SHIELD, Postcards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:25:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A history of Clint and Natasha through postcards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postcard of a Painting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inkvoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/gifts).



> Written for the [be_compromised Promptathon of Magic and Joy 2013](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/318314.html). Prompt by [inkvoices](http://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices). Beta'd by the wonderful [shenshen77](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shenshen77/pseuds/shenshen77). Title from Postcard of a Painting by Maximo Park.

The first one arrived one and a half weeks into her ‘initiation’ into SHIELD. It was brought by an officious and annoyed looking Mitigation Officer, accompanied by a psychiatric doctor, a woman she knew to be a Russian translator called Nureyev and a man she was sure was called Evans; a high up someone-or-other. It was placed in front of her with a measured “Does this mean anything to you?” which was ruined by the general air of ‘we don’t want you here and have possibly found the rope with which to hang you’ that pervaded the room like a particularly offensive perfume.  
  
It was a black and white postcard of two smiling children from the 50s, holding hands and eating ice cream on a beach. On the back, in handwriting she only knew to be Barton’s because she’d seen him scrawling his name across various documents when she was brought in, were the words ‘ _Darling! Miss you!_ ’ and a smiley face.  
  
She is sure that the only reason that both she and Barton didn’t end up in more trouble was the entirely genuine incredulity of her spat out “What. The fuck” in Russian. Also, the two seconds of overheard conversation – well, tirade judging by the expletives and the how-could-you-be-so-stupid tone – between a man so bland she almost immediately forgot him and someone (all signs point to Barton) on the other end of a phone.  
  
However, that didn’t stop her having three extra interrogations about both her motives and her ‘relations’ with Agent Barton, which she planned to take out on him when she was finally cleared to spar with other people in the training rooms.  
  
The postcard ended up crumpled up in the corner of her desk drawer. But not thrown away. No matter how angry she was at Barton for jeopardising her one proper chance at a fresh start, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Because no one had ever given her a chance, and no one had ever sent her a postcard, and no one had ever said they missed her. And no matter how much she doubted Barton’s sincerity, it still meant something.  
  
_  
  
She received two more postcards from Barton whilst still completing her ‘initiation’. One of a bird of some sort with the words ‘ _Does this MRE taste funny to you?_ ’ on the back (answer: what the hell? Also: probably, MREs always taste funny) and one of the painting The Pink Dancers, Before the Ballet by Degas with the words ‘ _Bet you I can sing better though_ ’.  
  
She didn’t know how they ended up in her quarters, or who allowed them to be passed on. If this were any sort of place she understood, they would be burned and she would probably be beaten, or worse. But this wasn’t anywhere she understood, and Barton was possibly the strangest person she’d ever encountered. He hardly knew her, but had decided to send her postcards of random things with inane comments on the back that she assumed where meant for the people around him, and not her. She couldn’t work out his motives.  Was this a code she was supposed to unravel? A test? A way of unsettling her? A strange initiation tradition?  
  
The Degas card was particularly unsettling. When she had been in the Red Room, books were the primary educational materials available to the girls about the ‘decadent West’ (something she later found out to be the organisation desperately clinging to the Soviet glory days, as she wasn’t even ten when the USSR was formally dissolved). Her favourites had been the art books, each one showing thousands of beautiful people and places she was unlikely ever to see. And for a little girl whose only true pleasure came from the ballet lessons used to teach grace and poise (and to act as an extension to seduction), Degas’ little dancing girls had always been her favourite.  
  
Barton couldn’t have known that, but it was disquieting all the same.  
  
_  
  
Once Barton returned from wherever SHIELD sends agents who bring back alive the targets they were sent to kill, and she was cleared for partnered sparring, she beat the everloving hell out of him in front of five new recruits and a senior trainer.  
  
The next day she found a postcard in her locker of a Japanese woman brandishing a samurai sword. On the back it said ‘ _You hit like a girl_ ’.  
  
_  
  
Some months after she beat the crap out of Barton in the training rooms, he was sent on a long running deep cover operation (contrary to popular belief, he is sent on more of these missions than she is – being one of the most well-known former operatives of a well-known ex-Soviet training programme has its drawbacks, clearly) and during the year and a half it took for the mission to be completed, she received seventy two postcards.  
  
They ranged from ‘ _FUCK IT’S COLD_ ’ (on the back of a picture of a desert), ‘ _This film isn’t as good the second time round_ ’ (on the back of a beautiful painting of a field full of foxgloves) and ‘ _Be more obvious why don’t you_ ’ (on the back of a severely crumpled postcard of Four Studies of the Head of a Moor by Rubens) to ‘ _I can’t find one of the stairs but that’s how I feel right now_ ’ (on the back of an MC Esher print of a white cat), ‘ _Sometimes I just wish I was a better person’_ (on the back of a photo of James Dean) and ‘ _FUCK. Why do they always have to involve kids?_ ’ (on the back of a joke card of a pinup saying ‘Wish You Were Her’).  
  
Most of these postcards were passed on through HR in bundles that she assumed they received through the myriad of contacts Barton had in whatever part of the world he was in at the moment. If she thought about it, that fact unsettled her; that there was a chain between him and her that somehow remained unbroken, no matter where either of them was.  
  
_  
  
She never confronted him about the postcards, not even after he came back from his long haul stint abroad and she’d received, since starting at SHIELD, one hundred and sixteen postcards. They talked now though, and she found herself genuinely liking him; he was funny and quick witted with an exceptionally dark sense of humour and a laugh that crinkled his eyes. They sparred and went for coffee and complained about paperwork together. It was comfortable, nice even.  
  
But they never talked about the postcards. Which was why she was surprised to have Barton walk past her one day and, grinning, shove a postcard in her hand that said ‘ _FUCK YES JOINT MISSION_ ’ on the back of a black and white postcard of a child covered in spaghetti.  
  
“So are we talking about this now?” She asked.  
  
He just grinned more. “If you want.”  
  
But she couldn’t really think of what to say. ‘I have every postcard you’ve sent me in a drawer in my kitchen’ seemed like a monumentally stupid thing to admit at this juncture.  
  
_  
  
After that joint mission – intelligence gathering leading to the termination of an African arms dealer – Natasha found a postcard in her bag. It was a 1920s ‘Scarborough The Tonic Holiday’ card with the words ‘ _You’re cute when you sleep. Like a cat. A deadly cat. With knives. Please don’t kill me’_ on the back. They hadn’t been to Scarborough (obviously), and they hadn’t shared a room. She was mostly just confused, but she punched him on the arm next time she saw him anyway. He just grinned and took her for coffee.  
  
_  
  
The postcard with Now Panic and Freak Out on the front and ‘ _SHIT_ ’ on the back was waiting for her after she came back from a mission in Abu Dhabi. It was followed by (or preceded by?) a postcard of a beautiful Islamic woman in a hijab which had a bullet hole in the bottom right corner. The back had an arrow pointing to the hole and the words ‘ _Look! It missed me!_ ’ in black felt tip. The back also had blood on it. A small part of her brain was wondering how and why he’d decided to pick up or go back for this card when there were clearly more important things to be worrying about. The larger part of her brain was flooding her body with fear and adrenaline that only somewhat abated once she found Barton (Clint really. They’d got to the point where he was Clint) in the medical wing of HQ, having just been transferred there.  
  
Because yes; _that_ bullet had missed, but another had hit its mark.  
  
She opened with “This isn’t fucking funny, Clint.”  
  
“No. No it’s not.” He replied, voice slurring ever so slightly. “Wait, what’s not funny?”  
  
She only just managed to refrain from hitting him on his injured shoulder. “This, you fucker,” she snarled, holding up the postcard with the bullet hole through it.  
  
“It’s a nice card!” Clint defended.  
  
“You said it missed!”  
  
“It did!”  
  
“Yeah, but that one didn’t!” She gestured at his shoulder.  
  
“Yeah but that wasn’t the same bullet, was it?” he quipped.  
  
This time she did hit him. He yelped and she glared at him. “What!? Can’t you take a joke anymore?”  
  
“Don’t,” she said in a dangerous voice, “worry me like that again.”  
  
Clint looked surprised, then he smiled and looked down at the bed sheets. There was a pause and then he said “Okay, Tasha,”, and she had to leave before trying to dissect his expression drove her mad.  
  
_  
  
Natasha occasionally found postcards from Clint pushed into her locker from the outside (‘ _Wish you were here. J. just farted. You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?_ ’ on the back of a Rothko) and – a novelty – in the post box for her flat (‘ _I PITY THE FOOL! Oh no, you won’t get that_ ’ on a picture of the Chrysler Building all lit up). He also gave them to her in person sometimes; ‘ _F. looks super angry today. Which dictator will get it in the neck this time? Place your bets!_ ’ on the back of a camel with googly eyes, ‘ _CANON BALL!!_ ’ on a Picasso dove and ‘ _Coffee? y/n_ ’ on the back of a Carl Sagan quote (the answer was almost always yes.)  
  
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for those postcards to become a central part of her time at SHIELD; as much a feature as endless paperwork, hard pillows and Doreen in the canteen.  
  
_  
  
The second time Clint was sent on a long term mission for SHIELD, Natasha was sent on a deep cover operation of her own. She was away from the US for almost two years. Clint’s mission was about the same length and during the entire two years they were apart, she received three postcards – which was amazing really, given the fact that they were both on _long term deep cover missions_. It didn’t stop her missing them though. And when did they become so important anyway?  
  
The first of the three arrived about four months into her mission. It was pushed through her door and was of the Moai of Easter Island, where she knew Clint definitely _wasn’t_ because nothing ever happens in Easter Island. It’s too far from… everywhere. On the back it said ‘ _Remind me never to eat noodles again. Ever_ ’ which made her smile. She stuck it to the door of her kitchen cupboard in the house she was given to stay in by SHIELD. If anyone asked, her brother had been on holiday in Easter Island.  
  
The second one came after about a year. It was a gorgeous postcard of some truly impressive mountains and she was given it from her SHIELD liaison. On the back was a quote; ‘ _If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world – THE HOBBIT_ ’. Natasha couldn’t decide if this was a result of the mission Clint was currently on, or simply proof that he occasionally picked up books.  
  
The last one came about three weeks short of her completing the mission, and about two months from the end of his. It was of some abstract bronze sculpture and the message on the back said ‘ _C. said this would get to you. Which is good cos it’s important_ ’. It had what looked like half a drawing on it, but she couldn’t work out what made it so special.  
  
After she arrived back in New York – after the debriefs and the endless meetings about where to go from here – she found a bag of eighty three additional postcards had been delivered to her desk. She took them back to her flat and read them all, one after the other, before deciding that her favourites were ‘ _I can see the stars from here_ ’ on Van Gogh’s Starry Night (obviously), ‘ _FUCK YOU I WANT MY MONEY BACK THESE ARE SHIT_ ’ on an old postcard of a beautiful Indian temple and ‘ _well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music_ ’ on a postcard of a nineteenth century map of the world.  
  
She checked every one, combing them carefully, but none threw any light on the ‘important’ card that she received while away.  
  
_  
  
Sometimes Natasha received postcards from Clint that were not actually written by Clint. Normally they meant that Clint had been an idiot and couldn’t write them himself or – once – that he was bored and decided to get someone else to write something for the hell of it (‘ _H. says that this will get to you. I want proof_ ’ in Hadithi’s handwriting; the look on her face when Natasha had nonchalantly slid it in front of her back at base two months later had been fantastic).

But they don’t happen often. In fact, other than Hadithi’s, there had only been two; a postcard of Van Gogh’s Cherry Blossom with ‘ _H. says; screw you I’m not an invalid_ ’ in Coulson’s neat handwriting that meant Natasha had to go to medical _again_ to see him, and a wonderful portrait of a Chinese woman with ‘ _I’m not writing what H. said. You know there are actually stacks of postcards saved up for you right?_ ’ in handwriting she didn’t recognise. Which is just as well, because she’d have to track them down just to demand _what the hell they meant by that_.  
  
(She could guess, but all signs pointed to a box of postcards under her bed and _she was not part of this, no way_ ).  
  
_  
  
After those two long ops, she and Clint did about a dozen short missions. Most were done together and the postcards she received from those were of the ‘ _You snore, did you know that?_ ’ and ‘ _Getting breakfast. Bagels right? (Too late to change your mind anyway)_ ’ variety, either left for her on the nearest available surface or simply passed to her as he left the safe house. Those few missions done apart resulted in ‘ _FUCK YOU I’M FABULOUS_ ’ on the back of a postcard of a drag queen, ‘ _This Tolkien fellow isn’t half bad_ ’ on the back of a forest of aspen trees and ‘ _Russian authors are damn depressing_ ’ on a postcard with ‘the sun shines for everybody’ written in several different languages.  
  
And then there was the painting by J Vettriano with ‘ _Remember_ _Milan? Fuck_ ’ on the back. And of course she does, because her dress had been backless and his eyes had followed her around the room. And she had thought; _yes_.  
  
_  
  
The first time they slept together was an accident. Or, not really. Sort of. It wasn’t intentional, but Natasha wasn’t so in denial that she couldn’t acknowledge that the sexual tension between the two of them could be cut with a butter knife.

It was after one of those missions where everything went wrong, and the feeling of surviving was so overwhelming it bordered on euphoria. No matter what other agents say, those types of missions don’t happen very often; Natasha thought that if they did, she and Clint would have slept together years ago.  
  
It was frantic and borderline desperate, left over adrenaline at war with the sudden need for _skinskinskin_ , and if she were more in charge of her faculties, the relief she felt when she finally got her hands on him would have scared her witless. But as it was, it was drowned out by a deluge of want and breathy moans.  
  
Natasha had never experienced anything quite like it, and a part of her was whispering _this is what they mean. This is it_ but she couldn’t deal with that, so she bit and kissed and ran hands over fevered skin and distantly marvelled at the compulsion to just hold on; to press herself against every inch of him and just _feel_ – his arm around her waist, his heartbeat under her ear.  
  
When she eventually pulled herself out of the lust-haze – the electric shocks of his touch and the summer-heat of orgasm slowly fading away – she thought of the card ‘Now Panic and Freak Out’ with ‘ _SHIT_ ’ written on the back, and every card he’d ever sent her with undertones of ‘this was a terrible idea’. And then she thought of the postcard of the drag queen with ‘ _FUCK YOU I’M FABULOUS_ ’ on the back and she giggled into his chest, muffled and breathy and sounding slightly mad.  
  
Clint smiled down at her and huffed out an amused “What?”  
  
She smiled back, trying to keep everything she was feeling from bleeding through, and said “Fuck you, I’m fabulous” and laughed at Clint’s confused face, and even more when he got it.  
  
She pressed closer to him again, impeded slightly by the bed sheet tangled around their legs, and as she drifted off to sleep she wondered if there would come a time when she could answer all questions with a 4 by 6 inch card and Clint’s handwriting.  
  
_  
  
Natasha wasn’t quite brave enough to be there in the morning, so she left.  
  
As she was quietly shutting the door, she thought of a card Clint had sent her a couple of years back; it had been of an obscenely well-dressed man with a glass of whiskey and ‘fuck me’ eyes. On the back, in green ink, were the words ‘ _Yesterday I fell out of a 3 rd story window in a tux. I’m sure there are less dignified things, but I can’t think of them right now_’ and she realised she could already answer all questions in postcards and Clint’s handwriting.  
  
_  
  
Once the dam was broken they found excuses to sleep together whenever possible, and proceeded to talk about it almost as much as they did about the postcards. The only difference was that now cards turned up in her room with things like ‘ _Jesus, your legs_ ’ and ‘ _I can think of 101 better things to be doing right now and they all involve you naked_ ’ on them.  
  
It felt heady and slightly childish, and Natasha wonders if this was what being a teenager felt like. It was addictive, and Natasha was possibly the happiest she’d ever been. But they still both woke up on their own.  
  
Turned out Clint wasn’t really much braver than her.  
  
_  
  
Clint’s third deep cover mission was about a year later. They were closer than they had ever been, and there was a possibility that Clint now knew Natasha better than anyone ever had, but they still didn’t really acknowledge the thing between them. As if they were both in denial about the other one knowing, as if acknowledging it would shatter the illusion, hurling them back to a time when they were alone and nobody cared enough to make sure they weren’t splitting at the seams.  
  
The distant terror of losing him clawed at her heart.  
  
She wasn’t there when he was deployed, and half of her was glad because she knew she would have done something stupid if she had been. The other half of her just wished she could have seen him one last time before he left.  
  
The postcards started coming about two weeks in, and this time she knew that they were delivered via Moreno to Coulson and on to her. Sometimes she wondered what the rest of SHIELD thought of this arrangement, but most of the time she felt that if SHIELD couldn’t get innocuous postcards to her without being caught then she sure as hell wouldn’t trust them with valuable information.  
  
The first one to arrive had a zebra on it and said ‘ _You might say I’m stupid but I swear the sky is bluer here_ ’ and in total, she received sixty four cards during the course of his mission. One said ‘ _I’m not sure I can get on board with this modern art shit_ ’ on the back of Duchamp’s Fountain, another arrived with ‘ _OK so Tchaikovsky’s not all bad_ ’ on the back of a beautiful painting of a deer.  
  
But then there was the picture of the midnight sun with ‘ _You’re not here. I… don’t like it_ ’ on the back in smudged red ink and, sometime later, ‘ _I think maybe soon_ ’ on the back of a painting by someone called Liam Spencer.  
  
She still hadn’t brought them up properly with Clint, and they’d managed to sleep together for more than a year without talking about it. But ‘maybe soon’… that was… that was different. Up there with ‘it’s important’.  
  
Maybe Clint was right. Maybe soon.  
  
_  
  
The end of Clint’s mission coincided with Natasha going to liaise with the British, and during the month she was away, he was sent out again on another short mission. They missed each other by days, and when she arrived back stateside a postcard was waiting for her with a camel on it, face on to the camera and chewing. It was hilarious, frankly. On the back Clint’s chicken scratch handwriting spelled out ‘ _I laugh in the face of danger! Ha! Ha! Ha! (Ow)_ ’ and she once again found herself by his bedside in Medical.  
  
However, this time it was different.  
  
This time, she stared at his hands and wondered if he knew this would happen when he sent her a card with ‘ _Darling! Miss you!_ ’ and a smiley face on it while she was still being initiated. If he’d guessed that it would lead to a box of postcards beneath her bed and a clawing feeling in her chest when she went too long without one, without him. If he’d predicted the ‘ _You know there are actually stacks of postcards saved up for you right?_ ’ and the smudged ‘ _You’re not here. I… don’t like it_ ’. If he could have guessed the two postcards on her desk, both in her compact hand and never sent or passed on; one saying ‘ _I don’t understand what you’ve done to me_ ’ on the back of a black and white picture of Japanese cranes, and the other saying ‘ _please come back’_ on a picture of a sunset over Monument Valley.  
  
She wondered if _she_ would ever have guessed.  
  
When he woke up Natasha was holding his hand, because she figured they both knew by now. And when he looked over at her, she managed to pull up a small smile from somewhere, before asking,  
  
“Is this ‘maybe soon’ enough?”  
  
It took a moment for him to work out what she meant, but as soon as he did he inhaled quickly and _looked_ at her, properly looked at her, and then down at their entwined hands, and his voice was hoarse when he said “Yeah, probably”, followed by “Get me out of here”.  
  
So she did – even though he wasn’t really strong enough. She took him to his room, where she helped him stand while he dug around in his drawers for a moment, and then handed her a postcard. It was of Rodin’s Kiss, and the back was almost black with cramped writing.  
  
He said, “Work it out.”  
  
“I don’t need to,” she replied.  
  
He said; “Do it anyway.”  
  
So she helped him to his bed, and made sure he was comfortable and not aggravating any of his wounds, and then she nodded and left.  
  
_  
  
The postcard was written in Spanish, and though Natasha could speak a myriad of languages, Spanish was not one of them. Its edges were soft with wear and it was creased, but in a way that suggested that it had been repeatedly smoothed out again.  
  
Natasha wondered how old it was.  
  
She cancelled a coffee date with Maria and Carol and instead went to find a Spanish dictionary to help with the translation made all the more difficult by Clint’s constant use of colloquialisms, his terrible handwriting and a weird scribble in the corner. But four hours after she left Clint in his room, she had it;  
  
 _This should be in French – it’s the language of love after all, isn’t it? – but my French is for shit._  
  
 _It was the stupidest thing I ever did, not killing you, you know that, right? I was all ready, bow taut and breathing even and you looked at me and NO ONE WAS HOME. Little baby grew up to be a monster. Apart from you didn’t grow up, did you? You were made. Had anyone given you a choice before then? Did I even give you a choice? I can never tell._

 _Oh but it was stupid. Even without you being the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, you would be. And you don’t even know. Or maybe you do now. Maybe I outted myself in some spectacular manner and you shot me down, as you should. I can’t work out if that would be better or worse that this now, this horrible clawing NEED that makes it hard to breath around you sometimes._  
  
 _Apparently the idea behind the couple in the Kiss is that they were killed before their lips ever met._  
  
 _I’d give anything to kiss you._  
  
_  
  
She walked back into Clint’s room with three postcards in one hand and a box under her arm. Clint jerked awake at the sound of the door and then hissed in pain as his ribs protested, but he didn’t say a word when he saw who it was and Natasha said nothing in return. Instead she moved to his side, putting the box and postcards down to help pile the mediocre SHIELD issue pillows behind his back so he could sit up comfortably.  
  
And then she just looked at him; taking in the apprehension in his eyes and the nick in his chin from shaving, the bandages around his shoulder and the creases on his forehead, the calluses and the scars and the bruises and the soft t-shirt.  
  
The right words were clawing at her throat, but she couldn’t get them past her lips because suddenly she realised, in a way she never had before, that she would be dead if it hadn’t been for this man. Not because he would have killed her or that someone else would have – because that was always a possibility, no matter who she was facing – but because she would have let them. Because she didn’t realise how little she cared until someone else came along and showed her what she was missing; friendship and trust and postcards with smiley faces on them.  
  
But the words wouldn’t come, so instead she placed the Rodin card on his lap, and then held out the two others; one with Japanese cranes on it saying ‘ _I don’t understand what you’ve done to me_ ’ in blue ink, and the other a sunset over Monument Valley with the words ‘ _please come back’_ in black.  
  
She watched as he realised what he was seeing, and when his hands tentatively curled around the edges of the cards, she reached for the box on his bedside table and tipped four hundred and thirty seven postcards onto his lap.  
  
_  
  
She only worked out that the half drawing on the ‘it’s important’ card matched up with the scribble on the Rodin card when she was putting them all back into the box several hours later.  
  
They made a little target. They dated the Rodin to five years previous.  
  
Sometimes Natasha wonders how she managed to survive in this business for so long, when she could be so monumentally stupid.  
  
_  
  
While Natasha is working in Stark Industries, she receives in her in-tray a postcard of a couple in the shower, the woman’s back and her partners hands pressed up against the glass. On the back it says ‘ _Did C. pass on a kiss from me? He was supposed to_ ’ with a smiley face.

**Author's Note:**

> The reason this prompt grabbed me is very easy: [observe my bedroom wall](http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m230/i_am_carp/P1020280.jpg). Yeah OK most of those postcards weren't sent to me, I bought them myself, and most of them are actually flyers, but that is really not the point. The point is I just like postcards and collaging, OK? And if anyone ever feels like making graphics of the postcards in this fic, I can provide you with about 80% of the ones mentioned. And if I don't have them, I can tell you exactly what pictures/paintings I was thinking of.


End file.
